Can the private doctors that service the politicians also strike please. For us. I feel the upper echelons of society never really feel our struggles. They only read about it.
We do need more GP hours to be available and we do need better weekend access to health care but we cannot overburden existing staff. We need to improve GP access by making the profession more tolerable to work so we can have more GPs so we can provide more slots rather than force one GP to see an entire city.
When Michael Gove was doing that piece of theatre about not being able to get an Xray in a small hospital at a weekend (some years ago) , a senior Doctor wrote to the Telegraph saying he had tried to make an appointment to discuss the matter with Mr Gove, but was surprised to find he was only available on a Friday, and definitely didn’t work weekends.
Asking doctors to work beyond decision fatigue will only cause good doctors to burn out, leave the NHS and encourage the shabby doctors, giving the public an inferior outcome.
Lower standards are then more profitable for the American healthcare corporations.
GP’s should be open on weekends, however it should be done in the right way with proper shifts and time management, as-well as proper pay and work load balances.
I am completely on board with the 30% pay rise and the issues with new contract terms, but striking over working Saturdays is.. not the one.
That being said, I’m not sure if the headline is just picking the most irrelevant thing to make it seem unjustified. I’m sure there are genuine issues with the contracts, and they just picked the most superficial reason for the headline.
“Work on Saturdays”
Aka pay and conditions. They already work weekends, you’re just being baited into hating them for asking for better funding for the NHS
at this point it would be easier to list who is not striking
Good just off the top of my head reverse privatisation and stop treating GP surgeries like little fiefdoms.
Hire more, pay more. Then there’s no need for Saturdays is there. Fuck sake.
So more demonising the medics.
Cool.
No wander a lot of us want to jump ship and go where we are wanted.
Anyone watched the panorama about the biggest GP chain? It’s actually shocking what’s going with GPs at the minute
I’m interested to see what the public and media at large make of these calls for strikes, plus the Royal Mail and wherever else calls in comparison to the recent railway strikes.
Why are we all so okay with medical staff being overworked?! Surely you don’t want to be seen by a doctor, nurse, pharmacist, technician or other healthcare professional who’s been working 14 hours, had 5 hours sleep and gotten up and done it again 10 days in a row for months… or years… on end?!
The general strike is beginning
I’m (almost) a GP and would happily work Saturdays if I was paid more and had a day off in the week. Flexibility is why I chose the speciality. You can force this but more appointments on a Saturday means fewer in the week. Last time I checked a lot of surgeries offered this but then packed it in because surprise surprise no one wants to come to the doctor on a Saturday. That may have changed now due to various pressures. However, you can’t just magic more appointments out of this air. They are selling this as there will be more appointments but there won’t be. Some figures for anyone who’s read this far:
1) about ten years ago the average person saw their Gp 3-4 times a year. That’s now about 10-12. 3 times more.
2) the studied safe number of patients seen a day by a GP is about 25. More than that is risky. GPs on average deal with 40 or so a day now.
There aren’t enough doctors. You can shuffle the pieces around all you want but demand is functionally infinite in most places. Lines open at 8:30 and appointments are full by 9 and that’s in good places. Emergencies will be seen or dealt with appropriately always. We don’t turn emergencies away. Though the public perception of what constitutes an emergency is different to the medical one.
We can see and deal with more patients by using phone appointments. Despite what online polls abs comments sections tell you most places I’ve worked people like that option. Yes there is a risk of missing things over the phone, but there’s more of a risk of missing things if I have no contact with you at all.
Quite simply there are not enough doctors despite the promises to raise our numbers. No amount of pharmacists, nurses or PA’s can make up the lack of doctors. And this government will never try and fix that.
What is happening is that austerity is coming home to bite everyone in the bum.
Government departments have been so underfunded for so long they can barely function. The dept of the environment lets water companies pollute our rivers because they only have the staff and resources to tackle major pollution incidents. The barristers are on strike because the legal aid system actually pays them less than minimum wage when you take into account their prep time and hmrc keeps on getting it’s budget cut.
Social services are overworked and stressed and whenever a kid dies unnecessarily they cop the shit when nobody looks at their workload.
Services are increasingly being outsourced to private companies in the name of efficiency but what happens is the public gets a worse service for more money. You get what you pay for.
There’s an interesting graph from the FT that suggests increasing working hours is not really feasible…
GP’s should work on weekends and its pretty lame that they don’t but they should be fairly compensated for doing so.
Just to double check who’s gone on strike: railway workers, teachers, criminal barristers, refuse staff and now GPs.
imagine if we had a medical service that was adequately funded and appropriately managed, with a health secretary that has genuine healthcare experience, and we had enough professionals that we could have a gp service run 7 days a week with no gp working more than 5 days out of 7.
I would absolutely love to see a GP on a Saturday and it would really help a lot of people. That said, there’s already a shortage and this is unfair on them.
Where are we going to find 20% more GPs, nurses, receptionist staff etc from?
Oh look, another botched attempt at “reform”.
There needs to be open and collaborative discussion on this, and not a hard fist of demand. That could be in the approach that it is a gradual transition, one that includes future contractual terms, and one where common sense is used to explain the positioning.
Junior Doctors are one of the most underpaid, overworked, debt riddled professions you could possibly find in any sector. Saddle this with a Senior Consultant, who is adequately paid, with most likely a Private gig on the side, and you’ve got a case of “one side for and one side against” without anyone considering the middle ground.
Society has shifted, and aspects haven’t moved along with it. GP surgeries haven’t shifted, and the fact that a GP, nay a Pharmacy, is not easily accessible on a Sunday is a very odd modern conundrum. Thank God for 111 I might say! But is 111 the true shift that’s required.
Weekend GP Surgeries are a need, but to try and implore such a thing from a half botched Health Secretary is just another example of how out of touch the Government is… And let’s not forget… This will be an attempt to once again bash how high Doctors salaries are, without mention of the Government funding going into the large Energy companies, Fuel companies and Rail companies, who are more than happy to increase their CEOs and Senior Board members salaries (and let’s not forget shareholders) whilst passing nothing into the actual workers of the company nor the customer…
Speaking as a medic who works weekends and nights, my colleagues who choose to become GPs mainly do so not because they love GP work, but because they love their weekends and nights to themselves. Yes, a few GPs do out of hours, but that’s of their own volition. Making it mandatory would definitely decrease the number of medical students wanting to become GPs in the future.
For those of you who do think GPs working weekends should be mandatory. Just something to think of.
Healthcare system is numbers game. Everyone who played SimCity or any city simulation game knows it is quite accurate. Once population grows older and lives longer – it adds to healthcare demand, plus dont forget growing number of illegal immigrants accessing paid NHS care. At some point system breaks. Just throwing Money or raising wages wont save it, it just needs more capacity, better distribution of services to sustain demand.
I am *legal* immigrant. For every year i am allowed to be in the UK I pay £300 – known as Immigration health surcharge.
Here’s simple math
There’s 27700 GPs working as of 2022
Uk has around 67 million people
So every individual gp. Not gp surgery, I mean physical gp, is responsible for 2400 patients.
Even if they don’t need to physically see the person, chances are they have to do admin work for that individual on the back end.
Let that sink in. 2400 patients to look after per individual doctor.
Even if only half of them need to be physically seen per year. They’ve already got 6 appointments per day guaranteed. (3 new 3 followups)
That is why you can’t see your GP
And then the government wants to INCREASE their workload AND DECREASE their pay instead of making the profession more attractive to draw in more trainees.
Yeah fucking right.
Any fool here so effectively tries to say that they would be happy if their job suddenly increased in workload for LESS pay while their bosses patted themselves with gloves made of money, is a troll and a disingenuous liar.
Gp surgeries used to be open on saturday mornings with cover at night and sunday.
Well I think this could be the most pointless strike in history.
What’s going to happen? You ring up and can’t get through to anyone, or if you do they won’t give you an appointment.
I honestly wouldn’t notice if GPs were on strike. I haven’t been able to get a GP appointment for 8 years.
If its something I am worried about I just go to A&E and wait 4 hours to be seen.
Would be more than happy for my GP to be open on Saturdays and give them a day off in the week.
How will anyone know the difference if GPs go on strike?
This country is fucked and the stories don’t even care. The evil fucks.
Lived in Australia for a while. GP surgeries are open in the evening and weekends. No need to book. Quite the eye opener. Different numbers and model obviously and Oz Medicare is not entirely free but you do kind of wonder quite why we can’t have more work friendly hours for some surgeries.
An absolute disgrace. Of course they should be working at the weekends. Just like every other emergency service. The same with the judicial system. They should be 24/7. It would cut the back log. As far as funding goes. The NHS is a black hole for finances. It wouldn’t matter if you put £100 billion into it. All that would create is more managers for paper clips or cleaning brooms or some other crap.
Haven’t they been striking for the past two years? I haven’t seen a doctor in person in ages.
Been waiting 5 weeks for an appointment….sorry doctors I work for the needs of my service users you should also.
36 comments
Can the private doctors that service the politicians also strike please. For us. I feel the upper echelons of society never really feel our struggles. They only read about it.
We do need more GP hours to be available and we do need better weekend access to health care but we cannot overburden existing staff. We need to improve GP access by making the profession more tolerable to work so we can have more GPs so we can provide more slots rather than force one GP to see an entire city.
When Michael Gove was doing that piece of theatre about not being able to get an Xray in a small hospital at a weekend (some years ago) , a senior Doctor wrote to the Telegraph saying he had tried to make an appointment to discuss the matter with Mr Gove, but was surprised to find he was only available on a Friday, and definitely didn’t work weekends.
Asking doctors to work beyond decision fatigue will only cause good doctors to burn out, leave the NHS and encourage the shabby doctors, giving the public an inferior outcome.
Lower standards are then more profitable for the American healthcare corporations.
https://www.theransomnote.com/commentary/news-commentary/list-of-mps-with-links-to-private-health-care-emerges/
GP’s should be open on weekends, however it should be done in the right way with proper shifts and time management, as-well as proper pay and work load balances.
I am completely on board with the 30% pay rise and the issues with new contract terms, but striking over working Saturdays is.. not the one.
That being said, I’m not sure if the headline is just picking the most irrelevant thing to make it seem unjustified. I’m sure there are genuine issues with the contracts, and they just picked the most superficial reason for the headline.
“Work on Saturdays”
Aka pay and conditions. They already work weekends, you’re just being baited into hating them for asking for better funding for the NHS
at this point it would be easier to list who is not striking
Good just off the top of my head reverse privatisation and stop treating GP surgeries like little fiefdoms.
Hire more, pay more. Then there’s no need for Saturdays is there. Fuck sake.
So more demonising the medics.
Cool.
No wander a lot of us want to jump ship and go where we are wanted.
Anyone watched the panorama about the biggest GP chain? It’s actually shocking what’s going with GPs at the minute
I’m interested to see what the public and media at large make of these calls for strikes, plus the Royal Mail and wherever else calls in comparison to the recent railway strikes.
Why are we all so okay with medical staff being overworked?! Surely you don’t want to be seen by a doctor, nurse, pharmacist, technician or other healthcare professional who’s been working 14 hours, had 5 hours sleep and gotten up and done it again 10 days in a row for months… or years… on end?!
The general strike is beginning
I’m (almost) a GP and would happily work Saturdays if I was paid more and had a day off in the week. Flexibility is why I chose the speciality. You can force this but more appointments on a Saturday means fewer in the week. Last time I checked a lot of surgeries offered this but then packed it in because surprise surprise no one wants to come to the doctor on a Saturday. That may have changed now due to various pressures. However, you can’t just magic more appointments out of this air. They are selling this as there will be more appointments but there won’t be. Some figures for anyone who’s read this far:
1) about ten years ago the average person saw their Gp 3-4 times a year. That’s now about 10-12. 3 times more.
2) the studied safe number of patients seen a day by a GP is about 25. More than that is risky. GPs on average deal with 40 or so a day now.
There aren’t enough doctors. You can shuffle the pieces around all you want but demand is functionally infinite in most places. Lines open at 8:30 and appointments are full by 9 and that’s in good places. Emergencies will be seen or dealt with appropriately always. We don’t turn emergencies away. Though the public perception of what constitutes an emergency is different to the medical one.
We can see and deal with more patients by using phone appointments. Despite what online polls abs comments sections tell you most places I’ve worked people like that option. Yes there is a risk of missing things over the phone, but there’s more of a risk of missing things if I have no contact with you at all.
Quite simply there are not enough doctors despite the promises to raise our numbers. No amount of pharmacists, nurses or PA’s can make up the lack of doctors. And this government will never try and fix that.
What is happening is that austerity is coming home to bite everyone in the bum.
Government departments have been so underfunded for so long they can barely function. The dept of the environment lets water companies pollute our rivers because they only have the staff and resources to tackle major pollution incidents. The barristers are on strike because the legal aid system actually pays them less than minimum wage when you take into account their prep time and hmrc keeps on getting it’s budget cut.
Social services are overworked and stressed and whenever a kid dies unnecessarily they cop the shit when nobody looks at their workload.
Services are increasingly being outsourced to private companies in the name of efficiency but what happens is the public gets a worse service for more money. You get what you pay for.
There’s an interesting graph from the FT that suggests increasing working hours is not really feasible…
[Fewer GPs over 10 years](https://imgur.com/gallery/tPhoj0g)
GP’s should work on weekends and its pretty lame that they don’t but they should be fairly compensated for doing so.
Just to double check who’s gone on strike: railway workers, teachers, criminal barristers, refuse staff and now GPs.
imagine if we had a medical service that was adequately funded and appropriately managed, with a health secretary that has genuine healthcare experience, and we had enough professionals that we could have a gp service run 7 days a week with no gp working more than 5 days out of 7.
I would absolutely love to see a GP on a Saturday and it would really help a lot of people. That said, there’s already a shortage and this is unfair on them.
Where are we going to find 20% more GPs, nurses, receptionist staff etc from?
Oh look, another botched attempt at “reform”.
There needs to be open and collaborative discussion on this, and not a hard fist of demand. That could be in the approach that it is a gradual transition, one that includes future contractual terms, and one where common sense is used to explain the positioning.
Junior Doctors are one of the most underpaid, overworked, debt riddled professions you could possibly find in any sector. Saddle this with a Senior Consultant, who is adequately paid, with most likely a Private gig on the side, and you’ve got a case of “one side for and one side against” without anyone considering the middle ground.
Society has shifted, and aspects haven’t moved along with it. GP surgeries haven’t shifted, and the fact that a GP, nay a Pharmacy, is not easily accessible on a Sunday is a very odd modern conundrum. Thank God for 111 I might say! But is 111 the true shift that’s required.
Weekend GP Surgeries are a need, but to try and implore such a thing from a half botched Health Secretary is just another example of how out of touch the Government is… And let’s not forget… This will be an attempt to once again bash how high Doctors salaries are, without mention of the Government funding going into the large Energy companies, Fuel companies and Rail companies, who are more than happy to increase their CEOs and Senior Board members salaries (and let’s not forget shareholders) whilst passing nothing into the actual workers of the company nor the customer…
Speaking as a medic who works weekends and nights, my colleagues who choose to become GPs mainly do so not because they love GP work, but because they love their weekends and nights to themselves. Yes, a few GPs do out of hours, but that’s of their own volition. Making it mandatory would definitely decrease the number of medical students wanting to become GPs in the future.
For those of you who do think GPs working weekends should be mandatory. Just something to think of.
Healthcare system is numbers game. Everyone who played SimCity or any city simulation game knows it is quite accurate. Once population grows older and lives longer – it adds to healthcare demand, plus dont forget growing number of illegal immigrants accessing paid NHS care. At some point system breaks. Just throwing Money or raising wages wont save it, it just needs more capacity, better distribution of services to sustain demand.
I am *legal* immigrant. For every year i am allowed to be in the UK I pay £300 – known as Immigration health surcharge.
Here’s simple math
There’s 27700 GPs working as of 2022
Uk has around 67 million people
So every individual gp. Not gp surgery, I mean physical gp, is responsible for 2400 patients.
Even if they don’t need to physically see the person, chances are they have to do admin work for that individual on the back end.
Let that sink in. 2400 patients to look after per individual doctor.
Even if only half of them need to be physically seen per year. They’ve already got 6 appointments per day guaranteed. (3 new 3 followups)
That is why you can’t see your GP
And then the government wants to INCREASE their workload AND DECREASE their pay instead of making the profession more attractive to draw in more trainees.
Yeah fucking right.
Any fool here so effectively tries to say that they would be happy if their job suddenly increased in workload for LESS pay while their bosses patted themselves with gloves made of money, is a troll and a disingenuous liar.
Gp surgeries used to be open on saturday mornings with cover at night and sunday.
Well I think this could be the most pointless strike in history.
What’s going to happen? You ring up and can’t get through to anyone, or if you do they won’t give you an appointment.
I honestly wouldn’t notice if GPs were on strike. I haven’t been able to get a GP appointment for 8 years.
If its something I am worried about I just go to A&E and wait 4 hours to be seen.
Would be more than happy for my GP to be open on Saturdays and give them a day off in the week.
How will anyone know the difference if GPs go on strike?
This country is fucked and the stories don’t even care. The evil fucks.
Lived in Australia for a while. GP surgeries are open in the evening and weekends. No need to book. Quite the eye opener. Different numbers and model obviously and Oz Medicare is not entirely free but you do kind of wonder quite why we can’t have more work friendly hours for some surgeries.
An absolute disgrace. Of course they should be working at the weekends. Just like every other emergency service. The same with the judicial system. They should be 24/7. It would cut the back log. As far as funding goes. The NHS is a black hole for finances. It wouldn’t matter if you put £100 billion into it. All that would create is more managers for paper clips or cleaning brooms or some other crap.
Haven’t they been striking for the past two years? I haven’t seen a doctor in person in ages.
Been waiting 5 weeks for an appointment….sorry doctors I work for the needs of my service users you should also.